Erico Verissimo, the son of a pharmaceutical business owner, was born in 1905, in Cruz Alta, South Brazil, of Portuguese ancestry. In the previous, his household was prosperous, but at the time of his birth their financial predicament was increasing tricky. His father was a bon vivant and spent dollars carelessly.
At the age of 15 he attended the Cruzeiro do Sul Higher College in Porto Alegre, a Protestant establishment, but he returned to Cruz Alta without having graduation. In 1922 his parents separated and he stayed with his mother. In his hometown, he worked in a series of jobs till he lastly went to Porto Alegre in 1930 to grow to be a writer. The mixture of that loved ones trauma and the later lonely death of his father in São Paulo had been to haunt him for the rest of his life.
Ranked beside Jorge Amado, Erico Verissimo is one of the most well-known writers of Brazil. He attended the literary circle of the writers of the 30s in Porto Alegre. And beside Dyonelio Machado, with whom he shared a literary prize in 1935, he developed the contemporary urban fiction of South Brazil. Since of his clarity and exactness, his prose is a joy to study. It is well-liked that Verissimo employed to contact himself a storyteller. But, in reality, he was a genuine novelist and his stories reflect his outstanding versatility, his penetrating insight into character, his brilliance in describing a scene, his skill for probing into the concealed fears and desires of ordinary folks. Certainly, he loved his characters, not for any virtues they may well possess, but just as they are.
In 1929, Erico Verissimo started to contribute quick stories to journals and magazines. His initially story, "Ladrao de Gado" ("Cattle Thief"), appeared in the Revista do Globo in 1929 and his initial novel, Clarissa, was published in 1933. Besides quite a few brief stories, young children books, autobiography and travel he wrote some thirty novels. Clarissa is an impressionistic portrayal of the life of a naive young girl with prose-poem passages. His second novel, Caminhos Cruzados (Crossroads), was published in 1935. His third novel, Musica ao Longe, a sequel to his 1st novel, won his the Machado de Assis Prize in 1935.
Erico Verissimo was presented for the very first time in the English language in 1943, when his second novel was translated by L.C. Kaplan and published by Macmillan in New York. Crossroads is generally taken to represent the author's condemnation of the hypocrisy of the tiny bourgeois. Additional importantly, it is representative of Verissimo's narrative art, it is produced up of small stories lived by characters with diverse social backgrounds, as a result developing a narrative that does not comply with a linear sequence. So the story does not have a central nucleus.
This strategy of fragmentation points to the general query of influence on Verissimo's fiction, and beyond that to the wider challenge of its location in the improvement of Brazilian modernism. The debt to Aldous Huxley and John Dos Passos was totally evident and in his memories Verissimo admitted the influence of Huxley's counterpoint method. In an post written for the literary supplement of the New York Occasions in 1943, book reviewer William Dubois commented that Erico Verissimo had an "electric" style. Note that Verissimo himself translated in 1934 Huxley's novel Point Counter Point (1928) to Portuguese. A second point to be designed is that yet another important ability that our author inherited from English tradition was how to deal with the passage of time in fiction. But, it appears to me that the actually important influence exists at a profounder level of composition.
Nevertheless, critics agree that the main influence at the initial stage of his profession have been Francis James and Katherine Mansfield. Notice that he was translator of Edgar Wallace, James Hilton, John Steinbeck, Robert Nathan, Katherine Mansfield, W. Somerset Maugham, amongst other people. Of these, he had no doubt that Maugham was a supreme storyteller master. Certainly English literature will be a continuous reference in Verissimo's work. Throughout the period he lived in the United States he had the pleasure to meet some of his idols: Thornton Wilder, Pearl S. Buck, W. Somerset Maugham, John Dos Passos, and Aldous Huxley. At the exact same time, Verissimo was fluent in French and in 1949 he had the honor to make a welcome speech to novelist Albert Camus in Porto Alegre. Maybe For the reason that he disliked the experiments with language of the modern day French novel, his consideration was caught by the structural innovations of the English novelists.
Olhai os Lírios do Campo (Consider the Lilies of the Field, Macmillan, 1948), Verissimo's very first accomplishment, appeared in 1938. The principal characters are two physicians. A physician committed to social difficulties, Olivia, falls in love with her colleague, Eugenio. He had a poor background and was in search of an uncomplicated fortune. Getting so eager for social popularity, he turns his back to Olivia and decides to marry a wealthy lady. But finally Eugenio and Olivia come to be lovers and have a daughter. The turning-point for Eugenio happens when Olivia is on her deathbed. One of the Much more clear advances amongst Consider the Lilies and the earlier fiction is in the sparing and Far more pointed use of dialogue. Now the absolutely free indirect discourse is made use of to describe the unspoken thoughts of characters without the need of resorting to standard dialogue. In addition to, the flashbacks are highlighted by italics to aid the reader to realize the passage of time.
In truth, the novel is of excellent pathos and at times indulgent sentimentality which appealed hugely to its readership and was instrumental in generating Verissimo's excellent recognition. Nonetheless, it has to be admitted that the novel is also characteristic of Verissimo's realism. The story is set in the shadow of the Revolution of 1930. And there are even some essential remarks on the political plan of Getulio Vargas, the Brazilian dictator. For the reason that his second and fourth novel touched some social delicate challenges Verissimo fell under the suspicion of communism deceiving the public into the belief that his books had been immoral.
What attracted him most right away had been the search for liberty and the inner states of feeling of his characters. Traditionally the critic divides Verissimo's fiction in 3 levels: a) the chronicle of the cities and of the bourgeois; b) the historical revision; and c) the globe society. The middle phase requires his art into an completely new dimension.
At the very same time, it is important to comprehend that, like the postmodernist writers, Verissimo's performs demonstrate expertise of his own fictionality. Verissimo continues to show his creativity For the duration of the remainder of his life and in the end alters his trajectory when he realizes that his major process was to recreate the history of his native state, Rio Grande do Sul. Certainly the writing of O Tempo e o Vento (Time and the Wind, Macmillan, 1951) was a turning point in his profession. The story consists in 3 components and is Verissimo's magnum opus. The composition and publication of the complete saga have been realized For the duration of the years 1947-1962. The story was translated to English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Dutch.
In 1954 appeared Noite (Evening, Macmillan, 1956). People today did not count on Erico Verissimo to write a dark novel. But we need to have to recall that For the duration of his life he was an avid reader of mysteries. The novel requires the reader into a claustrophobic globe exactly where the amnesic principal character, "The Unknown One", is hunting for his identity. His companions through a dreadful Evening are a cynic pimp and a psychopath midget, the unsafe individuals he met up in a sordid pub. Regardless of Getting a narrative about loneliness there is a lot of humour in Evening.
Now it is required to Take into account the books in which Verissimo reveals his political thought. That is the theme from O Senhor Embaixador (His Excellency the Ambassador, Macmillan, 1967), published in 1965, and O Prisioneiro, published in 1967. These novels need to be noticed as a improvement of Verissimo's suggestions about imperialism. Naturally, the international scene pervades the last literary phase of our author.
His Excellency the Ambassador is set in the imaginary Central American republic of Sacramento and in Washington D.C. The novel shows the conflicts of an artist, Pablo Ortega, For the duration of the period in which he is operating in Washington with the Latin ambassador who represents the dictatorship. Pablo Ortega is attempting pretty tricky to decide if he need to assist a communist revolution in Sacramento. Ultimately, in O Prisioneiro Verissimo requires us to the conflict of Vietnam and explores the moral conflict faced by a black Lieutenant who apparently will have to torture a Vietcong prisoner.
Verissimo's operates appear to supply us numerous methods of manipulate conflicts and appreciate life. Open to infinite possibilities of reading, his fiction has lastly accomplished its popularity. Erico Verissimo died of a heart attack in 1975.
Marco Antonio Bomfoco, M.A., Ph.D., is a long-time language enthusiast. He lives in South Brazil.
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